Geek Heresy (17 page)
Authors: Kentaro Toyama
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Destinationism over path dependency:
Ignore history and context, and take a single hop to the destination.
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External over internal:
Do not expect people to change; instead, focus exclusively on their external circumstances.
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Innovation over tried-and-true:
Never do anything that has been done before, at least not without new branding.
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Intelligence over wisdom:
Maximize cleverness and creativity, not mundane effort. Use intelligence and talent to justify arrogance, selfishness, immaturity, and rankism. (Rankism is abuse, humiliation, exploitation, or subjugation based on any kind of social rank.
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Value neutrality over value engagement:
Bypass values and ethics by pretending to value neutrality.
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Individualism over collectivism:
Let competition lead to efficiency; avoid cooperation, which breeds complacency and corruption. Any inhibition of individual expression, including compromise to support the common good, is the same as oppression.
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Freedom over responsibility:
Encourage more choices; discourage discernment in choosing. Any temperance of liberty, including encouragement of responsibility, is tantamount to tyranny.
This is an exaggeration, I’ll admit, but not an extreme one. I’ve been in hundreds of discussions about global poverty with academics, entrepreneurs, nonprofit staff, program officers, and government ministers. With striking regularity, someone will invoke some version of these points to justify their pet intervention with smug certainty of its power. Technocratic zealots aren’t satisfied by seeing their point of view
acknowledged; they want it to prevail. In this, they call to mind Larry Ellison, the cofounder and CEO of Oracle, who once said that he modeled his business tactics on Genghis Khan. “It is not sufficient that I succeed,” he said. “All others must fail.”
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Belief in the Tech Commandments isn’t limited to technologists, packaged interventionists, or devotees of RCTs, social enterprises, and happiness. Nor is it confined to any one group.
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It permeates social-cause circles on the political left and right, in the private and public sectors, among secular philanthropists and religious charities.
The Tech Commandments aren’t easy to counterbalance, because they contain kernels of truth. It would be pointless, even dangerous, to argue against metrics, innovation, or freedom per se. But as the Delphic oracle advised,
medem agan
– nothing in excess. Balance is utmost.
Teaching to the Test
The imbalances of the Tech Commandments creep into our systems little by little. Over time, however, they can snowball into major crises.
One example of this tendency is teaching to the test. A struggling school system prompts a narrowing of goals. The focus shrinks to reading, writing, and mathematics, which seems sensible enough and incurs little partisan controversy. Then, to measure progress at large scale, standardized tests are used as benchmarks. Pretty soon, raising the metrics becomes the only goal. Under pressure to increase scores, schools turn to quick fixes: technologies and methodologies that drill students in minor variations of common test questions. However, rather than fostering curious, productive, well-informed, and well-adjusted citizens, the mindless drilling erodes students’ motivation to learn.
Meanwhile, these changes prompt parents with means (as well as parents with vouchers) to send their children elsewhere – to private and charter schools. This response institutionalizes a two-tiered system that only aggravates the original problem. What started as an attempt to save a challenged school system is undermined by the technocratic overemphases on measurement, large scale, external change, individual choice, and supposedly value-neutral change.
This pattern generalizes beyond education. A struggling public effort prompts a narrowing of goals. The focus shrinks to improving health care, education, or economic output, which seems sensible enough and incurs little controversy. Then, to measure progress at large scale, the goals are benchmarked by mortality figures, average years of schooling, or income and GDP. Pretty soon, raising the metrics becomes the only goal. Under pressure to perform on the metrics, governments, donors, and civil society turn to quick fixes: technologies and methodologies that supposedly raise benchmark scores. However, rather than fostering independent, productive, neighborly citizens, packaged interventions delivered from the outside erode communities’ own capabilities.
Meanwhile, high-status communities disregard the inconvenient aspects of the same packaged interventions they peddle. This response institutionalizes a two-tiered system that only aggravates the original problem. What started as an attempt to cause positive social change is undermined by the technocratic overemphases on measurement, large scale, external change, individualism, and supposedly value-neutral change.
The Dimming of Enlightenment
I want to be clear that I’m not attacking technocratic goals in and of themselves. Technocratic ideas have become popular because they have profoundly altered human civilization in some very positive ways.
If you plumb the history of technological invention and large-scale social change, a lot of it can be traced to seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Europe and the historical period known as the Enlightenment or the Age of Reason. The Enlightenment saw an explosion of intellectual activity and laid the basis for the Industrial Revolution. Everything from steam engines to seaworthy clocks, from telescopes to barometers, emerged from that time. But the Enlightenment was much more than a burst of technology. Books about the era would fill entire libraries, but to compress it all into a Facebook post: In scholarship, the Enlightenment
ushered in the reign of science and reason over superstition and dogma. In culture, it exalted meritocracy and pluralism. In economics, it gave backing to property rights and national growth. And in government, it brought down dictatorships and gave birth to democracy.
These ideas were reactions to the prevailing unwisdoms of autocracy, imperialism, superstition, prejudice, and economic stagnation. Enlightenment ideas served as a counter to dogmatic rituals and monarchies that thrived on the backs of an uneducated, untitled population. Scholars of the Enlightenment routinely say that the period gave birth to the idea of
external progress
as something that was both desirable and systematically achievable for humanity as a whole.
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That is in contrast to the world before the Enlightenment both in and out of Europe – a time when it wouldn’t be too gross a generalization to say that human brainpower tended to focus on internal change. Ancient Greek philosophy and Judeo-Christian tenets ruminated on personal virtues. Confucian principles emphasized social harmony and respect for hierarchy. Indian religions stressed karmic forces and spiritual advancement.
Before the Enlightenment, major civilizations came and went on all the continents except Antarctica. None of them, though, built anything like the rich intellectual edifice on which the modern world was constructed.
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History has its twists and turns, but you can draw a straight line from the ideas of the Enlightenment to the contemporary world. Isaac Newton and others paved a highway for science and technology with their explorations into the laws of motion and electromagnetism. Baruch Spinoza and Jean-Jacques Rousseau laid the philosophical cornerstones of modern democracy. John Locke’s arguments for property rights and Adam Smith’s analysis of markets undergird contemporary capitalism.
And thanks to those foundations, some portion of the world gained more prosperity, justice, dignity, freedom, happiness, and peace than any civilization that came before. In 2006, global GDP was $50 trillion, with the rich OECD countries producing three-quarters of that dizzying sum. Most developed-world citizens had their basic needs met. Few struggled for food or shelter. Life expectancy at birth was seventy-seven years (well above the fifty-five-year life expectancy for the least
developed countries, or the thirty-nine years of, say, Massachusetts residents in 1850). Most OECD countries were democracies with rule of law and basic human rights protections. While some were engaged in war abroad, peace reigned at home. And the Global Values Survey found that citizens of the richest countries were consistently happier than their counterparts in poorer ones.
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So 2006 was a great year for beneficiaries of the Enlightenment. It seems only natural that we should keep doing more of a good thing.
Yet, just a few years later, things look much darker. We remain mired in an economic slump that is dragging down both spirits and bottom lines. In 2013 the world burned 33 billion barrels of oil (about half of them in the rich countries), chugged 207 billion liters of soft drinks, and cut down 1.4 million acres of Amazonian rain forest, and all of these things contributed on a colossal scale to pollution, climate change, a looming resource crunch, and poor health around the world.
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What’s more, the world’s richest, freest, happiest people are the ones who are most responsible for these problems. On a per capita basis, Americans consume as much as thirty-five times the natural resources of their developing-country peers.
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And the world’s financial troubles can be linked to the excesses of Wall Street, where people live like demigods and buy their own justice. It seems that prosperity, justice, dignity, freedom, happiness, and peace do not guarantee themselves – either forever or for everyone. If anything, it’s our success with these desirables that increasingly infringes on our neighbors and on our own future.
How could something so good have gone so wrong?
Essentially, we took the progressive ideas of the Enlightenment and forged them into a rigid technocratic orthodoxy. We are unable to entertain alternatives to tech-driven, capitalist, liberal democracy, so we pronounce it the ultimate salvation.
But if Adam Smith’s invisible hand spurs economic growth, it also pickpockets from the commons. Moral relativism permits plural virtues but also plural vices. Meritocracy rewards talent and diligence but neglects the collective responsibility to nurture those traits in everyone.
We rationalize our faith on the basis that it leads to the common good, all the while winking at the foibles it indulges.
Minor character flaws then weave a tragic destiny. To be sure, a value-free pluralism is better than monarchic oppression, but it is still not enough to ensure the public good. Wall Street bankers and global mining companies are un-oppressed, and free to trade pretty much as they wish, but in the daily choices they make between protecting the public good and fattening their bank accounts, does anyone truly believe they are choosing for the good? And if not, why do our dearly held convictions still support them? Why do we get excited about innovations such as high-speed electronic trading, even though they achieve little apart from amplifying greed and reinforcing undeserved advantage?
When Sarkozy announced his quality-of-life commission in 2009, he said, “We’re living in one of those epochs where certitudes have vanished. . . . [W]e have to reinvent, to reconstruct everything. The central issue is [to pick] the way of development, the model of society, the civilization we want to live in.”
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Whatever his flaws, Sarkozy put his finger on the core quandary of modern global society. We need a better story about what progress is and where we go from here. The Enlightenment served its purpose, and many of its technocratic values are worthwhile. But now we’re clinging.
Unfortunately, Sarkozy’s commission was a twenty-five-member group composed entirely of economists. To be sure, they were eminent economists, led by Nobelists Joseph Stiglitz and Amartya Sen.
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But, while economics in the abstract can be construed as a science of human well-being, economics as it is practiced today is a monstrous hydra of rational-agent models, linear utility functions, oversimplified regressions, dollar-based metrics, conflation of meaning with measurability, and can’t-help-itself support of free markets – and its many heads reassert themselves despite routine failures.
Again, it’s not that technology, packaged interventions, RCTs, social enterprises, happiness, scalability, measurability, and technocratic ideas in general are bad in and of themselves. Rather, the trouble is cultism and imbalance. New vaccines are good, but not while health-care
systems go unfunded. Educational technology might be helpful, but not if good teachers and institutional support are lacking. Elections are great, but not if social norms and government institutions don’t support democracy. Technocratic means might be a part of the solution, but with so much attention on them, who’s working on the other parts?
Balance is utmost, but balance is difficult even to talk about in a world of polarized sound bites.
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Novel, measurable, large-scale, turbo-charged, value-free, market-oriented packaged interventions for freedom-drunk, goal-driven, meritocratic individualists dominate our notions of social change. This creed has been terrific so far for those of us who have benefited. But the world’s persistent challenges and imminent crises suggest that what got us here won’t take us further. For a more enduring humanity, we need a better narrative of progress.
